Watchmen was… not a disaster.

Bear in mind, I loved the dystopic, chaotic, anarchistic, angry, four-toned panels of the original comic, so my opinion about a shiny, flashy, high-res, and slow-mo studded movie is bound to be reserved. I didn’t want to walk into another Wanted experience, so I deliberately set my standards low, low, low for the Watchmen movie.

On the plus side, the casting worked a lot better than I had hoped, and I think the choices were as good as any talent available in this generation. The tall and graceful Matthew Goode as Ozymandias was dead-on. He embodied everything I imagined a real-life Adrian Veidt would look be: charming, reserved, and intellectual. Jackie Earle Haley, who was wonderful as the pedophile in Little Children, makes filthy the entire screen with his intense, powerful character-acting; in this instance, the mad-twitch of emotion across Rorschach’s face that shows up even through his mask.

Billy Crudup, with a bit of digital blue height extension and a lot of apathetic nudity, carries the role of Dr. Manhattan through sheer voice alone: compassionate yet detached—an godlike, yet fallibly human enigma. Malin Ackerman is going to be a hot commodity after this movie, and justifiably so: she goes believably from teary-eyed waif to kick-butt bombshell without even stopping for a new layer of mascara.

The soundtrack to the whole piece, however, was unexpectedly disappointing. Heavy in popular ballads from the era, I found most of the licensed selections predictable and sentimental, which I thought worked against the entire purpose of the original story. It was slick and slyly paced to the action, however, and we're treated to more than one instance of ironic lyrical-visual juxtaposition where some seemingly inappropriate song plays while something completely ironically different happens onscreen. Oh, so ironic.

Ultimately, I think that the director made a movie genuinely watchable by fans, although you may not want to refresh your mind with the original story shortly before seeing this movie. (Put that one off until later.)